“Not as I hear it. The precipitating event of your exile was a bizarre ‘experiment’ that you undertook several years back, rumor of which left many uneasy. You invited a London street girl—a whore, certainly, like Annie and Long Liz and the others—into your home. You and a colleague labored with her night and day for well over six months, and it was desperately hard work for both you and the girl, a Miss Elizabeth Little, I believe. It brought you to the point of madness and violent anger. Assumptions include beatings, sexual improprieties, various profligacies. As for your colleague, you attacked him at one point. That, too, frightened off all your friends. They abhor physical violence. He now seems to have vanished.”
“So he has,” said the professor.
“So, too, has the girl. Did she flee to the country, go to America, commit suicide? No one knows, but it seems like the old Greek tale of Pygmalion, where the sculptor fell in love with his sculpture. Except in your version, you had much congress with the poor child.”
“This is beginning to disturb me. Are you making accusations?”
“Another question might well be: Who was your colleague? I believe it was Colonel Woodruff, who had come to you upon mustering out from mutual fascination with the mechanisms of language. He lived with you while you were working with Elizabeth. When he saw how you were abusing Elizabeth, he objected, and under his advice—and I’m betting with his money—she fled.”
“I loved them both. They betrayed me. That is all. Not much of a tale.”
“It never occurred to you that she might fear you rather than love you. It never occurred to you that Colonel Woodruff would—selflessly, as was his style—send her away because he feared what you might do to her. That is why you attacked him at the university.”
“So dear Jeb isn’t as simple as I thought. Not simple but slow, too slow.”
“You see how it follows. You devise a ‘profile’ for the crimes that indicates no one but Woodruff, down as far as the two rings he carried with him since 1857. So detailed were your plans that you approached me even before you had unleashed the J-U-W-E-S clue, which you used to snag me. And how snaggable I was. But in order for the proof to hold, there must be murders. What good is the profile without the murders? It follows that the murders were informed by the profile, not the other way around. That being the case, there can be only one killer.”
He said nothing.
“Dr. Ripper, I presume,” I said.
“At your service,” he said.
“Your madness and your brilliance are in perfect syncopation. Your madness kills to express your rage at her betrayal, and your brilliance finds use for it by constructing a ‘Ripper’ who terrifies the city and whom you track and vanquish. You get everything. You take everything from the weakest of all women on earth, the most powerless and degraded. You have your revenge on the colonel, who besides being murdered is then to be eternally damned in history. You want credit as the man who discovered and killed the Ripper, and it is my job to hand it to you. You get everything in return and make yourself in a society that has exiled you.”
“It’s too bad you’re so late to understanding,” said the professor. “Elizabeth was, too. She never quite apprehended me. My score isn’t five, it’s six. She was the first. She will not step out of the shadows to reveal my friendship with Colonel Woodruff. Nor will you. A few others got in the way. The colonel, of course, a bully here, a bartender there. All done in a good cause, I assure you.”
I saw his hand disappear under his coat and reappear with a butcher knife.
“I will find another newspaper fool,” he said rather calmly, as with the weapon he was controlling the action. “I will get what I deserve, as I have paid back those who betrayed me.”
“You, sir, are despicable.”
“Who are you to judge me, you tiny man? You offer the world nothing. I offer everything, from my genius to my higher morality to my designs of utopia. But to employ them I must rise, and rise I will and rise I have.”
I beheld him then: creature of nightmare, avatar of destruction, murderer from the dark hole of the Beneath, radiant in self-love and madness. Jack flagrante, Jack in excelsis, Jack gloria mundi, Jack rampant, Jack fortissimo. He was all that and more. It was Jack the Ripper, fully bloomed and unleashed, the butcher knife in his right fist, held high as he meant to step forward and drive it deep into me, knowing his strength was so much greater than mine, knowing how and where to place the blade, knowing that he had the physical skill to make the thrust and cut a hundred times out of a hundred.
“Look on me, you fool. Know who I am. It is worth your life to enjoy the privilege of a meeting with Jack. You are nothing before him. I, Ripper, now take your meaningless life and go on and on and on. Jack is forever.”
He had never been Sherlock Holmes. He had always been Mr. Hyde.
He stepped toward me, cocking his arm for the killing blow.
The bullet struck him in the shoulder, exploding a mist of wool fiber and atomized flesh, destroying it. He spun, dropping the knife as his beautiful tweed sleeve went limp, began to pulse and leak as it absorbed a tide of crimson, while the echo bounced and died along the bricks, dust fell from vibration and the rats, their tiny eardrums dashed by the sound, began to chitter and frisk.
The colonel stepped from the darkness, his Webley smoking in his hand. “You are arrested, sir,” he said.
Jack the Ripper looked upon us, the blood running through the fingers that tried to stanch its flow. “A trap, then,” he said. “Artfully done, between writer and soldier who engineered another miraculous escape. My compliments, Huw, but then you always were the hero. And I loved you, Huw, as I loved her, but the two of you hurt me and thwarted me to the full extent of that love.”
“Thomas, I loved you as well, but your genius turned to madness and evil. I could not save you. Now, sir, you must pay.”
“Not at your hand. I believe the dark prince already sends his minions to fetch me.”
He was right. The skittering turned to a scrabbling and then a clamor as five hundred clawed sets of feet advanced in their regiments and battalions, engorged by the smell of fresh blood. The vermin army hit him hard and began to scale his legs.
Squriming, seething, raging, Jack-mad in their own bloodlust, the vermin surrounded him and began to mount his legs, to crawl up his coat, to slip under his jacket and into his shirt. They crawled upon each other’s backs in their greed of flesh, becoming a new beast, featureless like a surge of animate pelt heaped at his legs, alive with squirm and slither and scrabble and squeak and chitter. It was as if he were being swallowed in the maw of some inchoate predator, in ravenous action so malleable and supple that its form was liquid. And though he beat at them, his blows were useless against the blood-mad truth of nature, raw, cruel, indifferent. The rats swarmed to and overwhelmed his face and began to eat it. He screamed, and such a cry it was, containing encyclopedias, whole languages, of pain and horror.
Colonel Woodruff shot him in the head and down he went, still.
I blew out the candle and we made straightaway to the ladder and in seconds were back to the surface of the known world, where December had declared its early darkness. We exited the club, where the chorus of song had drowned out what traces of gunshot might have made surface, went from Dutfield’s gates, and made our way toward Commercial, where, among the bright lights of the costers’ stalls of apples and cheeses and bright cloth, the hubbub of the beer shops, the jostle of the ladies and their suitors, made even more vivid by Christmas excitations, we reentered what was called civilization.
“All right, then,” said Colonel Woodruff, “it is done and you have your story.”
“I am not sure I will write it,” I said.
“It’s a free country, sir. Write or not, as you choose. But let me push an argument against you. It’s one thing if Jack is a foreign monster, a mad Russian or Jew, one of the them we seek to educate and civilize, charging only everything they’ve got. It is quite another when he’s one of us, of fine family, produced by our best universities, born on high and lived on high in a fine house on a fine street, published, respected, influential. For that man to have been raving evil might provoke some to sense corruption in the system. And I am wise enough, it may surprise you, to understand the system is indeed corrupt. But it is also necessary, at least for now, while our species is in its infancy. So if a smart lad like you and an old buzzard like me know it, no harm is done. If the ignorant, thus far obedient, but ever volatile masses know it, mischief is loosed. And who knows where mischief leads?”